11 Emotional Advertising Examples Most Used by Brands

Everyone knows that emotional marketing is difficult to do right. Marketers tend to focus on conversion rate, impressions, bounce rates, and bids, and we forget about the emotional appeal in the advertising.

According to the research from PsychologyToday, people respond to the emotional part of the ads a lot more than the text itself.

On the other hand, ads that convey strong emotions often go viral and produce awesome results. The study from HubSpot revealed that the most-shared ads relied on emotional content, including happiness, friendship, and inspiration.

In particular, Mariano Rodriguez from LawRank pointed out that “If you want to make people share and buy, improve your PPC campaign through the use of emotional advertising. This is an effective way to drive your campaign goals”.

How to create emotionally charged ads?

Most PPC specialists are using the standard formula while creating ad copy. It includes three points: keywords, CTA, and unique selling point. Fortunately, Google gives more space for creating expanded text ads where you can adopt emotional ad copy and build meaningful connections with potential clients.

Here are some tips on how to make emotional ads:

Check what your competitors are running – especially if you spotted them using emotional marketing. You can take over their ideas and make them even better. To spy on your rivals, use SE Ranking Competitor SEO/PPC Research tool.

Make a list of benefits your product provides. You can create a customer survey to see what they truly believe the benefits are. You can use Survey Anyplace to get the exact results.

Connect your emotional benefits with an image. The image should reflect your emotional values of the statement. Use Bannersnack to design stunning banner ads in minutes.

Emotions are one of the main reasons why people prefer using products of a certain brand. To encourage people to buy from you, use the following emotional trigger examples in your advertising:

1. Instant Gratification

People often expect instant gratification in many aspects of their lives, even if they are negative. The sense of urgency in your message always makes people get this right now. It is important to include words like today, now, within 24 hours, instant access, etc.

Don’t make your audience wait – just give what they want. You can give a discount or run a giveaway. Just give them a chance to win.

Here is a good example of this practice from Lavent Law who persuades people to call them to get their money if they are injured in an accident:

2. Happiness

Many brands want their customer to associate their brand names with smiling, laughing and positivism. Based on this study, the most-shared articles of the New York Times were positive and had emotional appeal. Positive advertising helps you get more engagement and increase sharing.

3. Fear

Fear is a good marketing tool to make people loyal to a brand, a product or a service. Fear makes people investigate some areas carefully and showcase warns of dangers that we can lose something if don’t take measures. Fear helps us grow and prevent people from bad behaviors like alcohol, drug abuse, and smoking.

For example, the World Wildlife Fund uses fear in advertising to increase awareness about the harmful effects of global warming. The image clearly shows that climate change will change you and your descendants if you don’t take action to keep it.

4. Trust

Nowadays trust is one of the most effective triggers in emotional marketing, and many brands try to jump on the trust board in their ads. Before customers trust and buy from you repeatedly, you should persuade them to trust you.

Try to be open and transparent with your customers. Everything should be visible in public view.

Show testimonials on your landing page and links to your reviews on third-party sites like Yelp, TripAdvisor, etc.

5. Sadness

Using negative emotions like sadness helps you deliver a sense of empathy or compassion. Many brands have noticed the effectiveness of using emotional content that creates public awareness of social issues like violence, gender equality, poverty reduction, immigration, and others.

It is essential to keep the balance when creating such kind of ads. You don’t need to upset your audience and evoke negative feelings made by your brand. Conversely, these emotions should motivate people to act and donate money to improve the situation.

For example, Children of the World promoted the Help Me Read This campaign to improve child literacy in New Delhi.

6. Anger

Using anger in ads makes people upset or annoyed about things like politics, environmental issues, political candidates, etc. Anger evokes a negative emotion that can cause negative associations.

Brands that use this emotion want to stimulate people to solve important questions and reconsider our perspective. They want to show people the overall situation and show positivity to change it for the better.

For example, the Always’ Like a Girl campaign uses a famous offense to catch more attention and encourage women to share their stories and the difficulties they face and play sports.

7. Belonging

Every person wants to belong to a group, a community, a family or a social network. The feeling of belonging helps customers satisfy their key psychological needs. Many companies use this emotion to make customers feel part of a particular group.

Especially, it is widely used in sport. It is a great place to show the feeling of belonging in action. The Rapha Cycle Club (RCC), a membership organization, is a great emotional appeal example. They offer people to ride with RCC members each week in your city and travel the world for RCC hangouts and meetings.

8. Guilt

Martin Lindstrom noticed in this article that guilt is the most puritanical among all our emotions that became an emotional consumer pandemic in the 21st century. People are easily influenced by messages that make them feel guilty. Many nonprofit organizations use this trigger in their advertising campaigns. They can be very effective and don’t have a negative thing. The Sears Craftsman is a good example. The message of guilt position the brand as the solution to current consumers’ issues.

9. Values

Values are one the hottest trend in marketing. Every day people make purchase decisions based on judgments and values. Many promotions are directly connected with the emotional trigger of making the best deal. It can include time, price and money.

Make sure that values are very subjective, and many companies do the best to boost the perceived value of their products. Once you understand the values of your target customers, you can create the best compelling and targeted ads.

For example, Citywide Law Group promotes the message “If you have been injured, you shouldn’t pay until we win” that is effective in arousing the feeling related to value.

10. Leadership

Consumers want to be the first to try new products or services. Brand promotions appeal to the emotional trigger related to leadership and make their target customers feel like they are first for this audience.

Do you remember the famous Nike’s campaign “Just Do it”? It is a great example that demonstrates the emotional trigger of cultural leadership.

11. Pride

This emotion is intended to all consumers who want to look smart and be proud of making a good choice. They want to be proud of purchasing organic food, a bestselling book or any money-value purchase. It is difficult to use this emotion because each person has different needs and desires, and you need to make a deep marketing research to support your offering with solid arguments.

Here is how Amazon Flex offers their customers to earn a good wage when delivering parcels with Amazon.

Bottom Line

Using emotions in your ads directly affects the buying process of a target audience. There is an old expression: “people buy emotionally, then justify logically”. No matter what you choose: happiness, fear, belonging or trust – the emotional triggers should resonate with your target consumers. Including facts and enough information about your products can increase the chance of purchase.

I hope the advertising trigger examples mentioned above will help you motivate your customers take action and become a global leader in your industry.